I am going to make another attempt to compete in the great mod challenge (last year I dropped a soldering iron on the logic board) I was wondering if it was possible to attach a hard drive to the disk drive port (sorry, I don't know the technical terms) I have a seagate momentus 60GB that I want to install, the primary Drive is going to be a 4Gb SSD just for the OS, then 60GB secondary drive for programs. I wouldn't mind the absence of the CD drive, I never even use the one in my primary laptop, and I wouldn't mind a secondary notebook without one, is it possible? Thanks for your help.

Thing is you will have a choice, go dual hard drives and lose the CD-ROM or just stick with single. The only way I can think of is to tap into the firewire and run a drive from the firewire but find a way to have it installed inside the iBook. Fitting a second hard drive into the iBook will be tricky.

what's the name of the cd-rom drive connector on an iBook? I'm going to take the CD-Rom drive out anyway, my aim is to make a semi-rugged iBook, that's why a i'm going to put a SSD in it. I plan to reinforce the iBook with steel and carbon-fiber rods, and use silicon caulk to keep the Logic board from moving inside the case.

It will work for data, you might have to do something about power though. That one looks like its meant to attach a notebook optical drive to a desktop IDE cable. It has extra connectors for the power since desktop drives don't take power over the bus. While the data will certainly work using it the other way around, you will need another adaptor from desktop to notebook IDE and you'll need to route the power from one of those extra connectors to the appropriate pins on the notebook IDE connector.

Looks like it would fit nicely though. As long as the optical connector is the right way up.

so I think that the iBooks have the hdd and the optical drives in the same bus, while in powerbooks they are seperate. So I'm not sure if running a 2nd drive in an iBook works, if it did I'm sure it would need to be 'slave.' But thats a pretty sweet product there - I may try to use it in an eventual Mod, probably not this year as I'll start work mid July, so I won't have any money in time. Maybe you could call them to see if it would work in an iBook.

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